I often run into situations where I have directories that contain only one file, a subdirectory, with contain only one file, a subdirectory, and so on for a long chain, until I get to the interesting files. These situations come up when I have only part of a data set so the files that would [...]

June’s challenge counted the most popular commands from a shell history. Some shells remember the last commands you used so you can start a new session and still have them available. For this exercise, I’ll assume the bash shell. You setup the history feature by telling your shell to track the history. You want to [...]

Find the top 10 directories on your system that has the most files in it. For that, only count the files immediately under it. That is, don’t count files in subdirectories. For file, I mean just about anything that isn’t a symbolic link or weird device. Think about how you want to show the person [...]

For June’s challenge, write a program to read the history of shell commands and determine which ones you use the most. In bash, you can set the HISTFILE and HISTFILESIZE to control history‘s behavior. To get the commands to count, you can read the right file or shell out to the history command. From there, [...]

March’s challenge was to find duplicate files. I often write a quick and dirty program to do this, having forgotten what I called the program or having failed to copy it to all of my accounts. This program helps me find extra copies of files that are taking up my space on Dropbox. Did I [...]